With her hippie-style name, engineering student Diana Dew seems like the perfect person to have thought of sewing phosphorescent lamps into vinyl clothing. This radical 1967 invention infused the hip-hugger pants and minidresses of the day with colorful, groovy, day-glo excitement. Dance floors became flashy kaleidoscopes of color that felt new and futuristic.

A battery pack fueled the juiced-up garment, and it took just a flick of the switch to light up your personal part of the night. Inspired both by space-age imagery and the visually excitable hippie drug culture, Dew first made her novelty Pop-art wear for a boutique called Paraphenalia, but hit the big time when her art reached the nation via Johnny Carson’s TV show.

Flush with the flash of success, Dew opened Isis, a Massachusetts boutique of her own, where she marketed her neon fashions as being like “LSD with none of the hang-ups.” And how could you help but leave your worries at the door after you opened it and saw thousands of little lights bouncing off gyrating bodies on the dance floor?